A lot of time, energy, and research is devoted to developing security features that are easy for consumers to recognize. I’ll give you a few easy tips here that I usually offer when I give tours of our various facilities:

Genuine US currency, which is printed on a mix of cotton and linen, has a completely different feel than regular paper. If you have a $20 bill handy, let’s use it as an example. Looking at the face of the note, lightly run your fingernail over Jackson’s cloak, below and around his chin. You should feel some little ridges as you do, and this is because of the way US banknotes are printed. Every note has this texture, because the Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing uses a process called intaglio printing that gives the notes a slightly embossed feeling. If you have a sheet of regular paper handy, feeling your $20 in one hand and the regular paper in the other will highlight something you’ve probably always known, but never stopped to think about.

Here’s another tip that you might not have recognized: every denomination higher than the $1 has a security thread running vertically through the note. It’s really easy to see if you just hold the note up towards the light. While you may have seen these in the past, you might not have noticed that the location of the thread is different for each denomination. So, for example, the vertical thread is to the right of Lincoln on the $5, but to the left of Franklin on the $100. It’s good to know a few basics like this to make it easier to confirm the authenticity of a note. Of course, the $100 also has a second, much more prominent blue, three-dimensional strip on the front of the note, with features that move sideways when you tilt the note vertically, and move vertically when the note is tilted from side to side.

Look for the watermark in the “open” space of each note higher than $1. There’s a watermark in genuine currency that’s easily visible on the right side of each note, which is very difficult to counterfeit in a high-quality manner. While it’s usually a face that matches the portrait on the note, in the case of the $5 bill you’ll see the watermark is actually a large “5”.

There are lots of other things to look for as well, such as the color shifting ink in some of the newer series notes.

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